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March 22, 2013

Cyprus, Russia - and Syria

Michael Weiss, NOW Lebanon

AP Photo

What the international financial press has missed in this frenzied geopolitical comedy is how intimately tied up the Cyprus-Russian financial nexus is with the unraveling nightmare in Syria. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the most vulnerable Russian financial institutions to be affected by a possible Cypriot default is VTB, the second largest bank in Russia. Splintered off from the USSR’s Russian State Bank (Gosbank), VTB is today 75 percent state-owned with a presence in 19 countries. In 2011, it took in the equivalent of 712 million USD in deposits from French and German pensioners, making it a rather significant retirement fund for Western Europe. It is also the only main Russian bank to have a licensed subsidiary in Cyprus, the Russian Commercial Bank, which...

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TAGGED: Vladimir Putin, Europe, Eurozone, Middle East, Syria, Russia, Cyprus

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